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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 1, 2024

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This complaint only makes sense if you think of words as having intrinsic or "correct" meanings. If you instead treat words as just vehicles for conveying ideas, then you could just answer "who in the world could we call a racist, then?" with "nobody, using it to describe people is pointless because it doesn't mean anything". And I think that's a reasonable answer if you're not going around calling people racist. If the word "racist" doesn't have to mean anything, then you can just not use it if you think it wouldn't help people understand the idea you're trying to convey.

It’s fundamentally my job to understand what they mean

No it isn't. It's the speaker's job to convey their idea in an easy-to-understand fashion. If there was an argument on this site where people were conflating the philosophical concept of free speech with the first amendment, then when I make a post in next week's thread about the philosophical concept it's my responsibility to clearly indicate that I'm not talking about the first amendment. If there were posts saying that the concept of "free speech" is incoherent and meaningless, then it's contingent on me to specify what exactly I mean by free speech. If enough people are confused, then it's probably better for me to not use the phrase "free speech" at all, and replace it with something like "the right to not be punished for conveying my opinion about the election".

So to answer your object-level question, you could (and should) directly say that you think "BAP has an unconscious bias against black people, regardless of their individual intelligence or behavior". If you want to know how a poster compares with the average 1995 American, you could ask "Do you think the average American in 1995 would agree with that statement? Do you agree with that statement?". You don't have to specifically use the word "racist", especially when you know it won't help people understand your point.